Writing on Law & Liberty, Northwestern law professor John O. McGinnis offers some sound advice to legislators who want to improve their state universities.
First, cut back on administrative bloat. Most schools today have far more administrators than in the past, sometimes outnumbering the faculty. And where to aim? McGinnis nails it:
This reduction should apply with particular force to the bureaucracies that run diversity, equity, and inclusion. These bureaucracies often have an ideological mission. Like bureaucrats everywhere, they want to expand their power and remit: bureaucrats spend a lot of time persuading others that we need more of them. DEI bureaucrats thus have an interest in viewing the world through the prism of systematic racism and sexism. As result, they bring in speakers who advance these views, giving an institutional boost to critical race theory. They are also often charged with investigating faculty who are accused of racism and sexism. But such investigators need to be epistemically open themselves, while the mission of DEI bureaucrats makes them more likely to favor the accusers.
Another good move would be to end racial preferences in admissions. Again, McGinnis gets to the root of the problem:
Students who do less well than others are not surprisingly less happy. And when a group that can identify itself on the basis of some characteristics does less well, it creates a disgruntled constituency for the administrators. One response is to create programs in which mostly those students participate so that they can do better on the curve. Another is to build bureaucracies dedicated to the proposition that the relatively poor performance is due to exclusion and discrimination. The students themselves also demand professors who cater to these views, creating a constituency for critical race theory.
Read the whole essay.